A gust of cool air blew into the clouds of steam before she could finish, and I looked over my shoulder to see the square velvet-skirted figure of Adriana da Mila coming into the scented heat of the bagno. I rose hastily from my stool—the Pope’s mistress thought nothing of chattering with servants, but her mother-in-law did not care to see the time she paid for being wasted. But Madonna Adriana hardly spared a glance for me or the suddenly industrious maid who had wiped the grin from her face and busied herself hauling Giulia’s mass of wet hair from the bathwater. Madonna Adriana looked at Giulia, and in her hand she held another letter.
“From His Holiness?” Giulia laughed. “I’ll swear he’s written every other day!”
“No, from Capodimonte. Your family.” Madonna Adriana’s face was unexpectedly grave. She looked at the maid and me and said, “Leave us.”
I curtsied silently and retreated. “Let’s listen,” the maid whispered, and we both lingered beside the half-open door.
“It’s bad news from your family, my dear,” Madonna Adriana’s voice continued. “I’m afraid it’s your brother.”
“Sandro?” Giulia whispered, so low I could hardly hear her. “Oh, no—”
“No, not Cardinal Farnese. Your older brother, Angelo. He’s contracted a very bad fever. Your family thinks . . .”
I heard a great splash of water in the bath. “Carmelina,” Giulia called. “Pia! Come back; I know you’re both listening out there!”
I flew back inside with another curtsy, in time to see my mistress levering herself up out of the bath. Water shed in all directions, and the plate of ricotta tourtes flew with a crack to the marble floor. “Pia,” she said to the maid, “fetch Laura’s nurse and have them both readied.”
“My dear, you can’t think of going to Capodimonte,” Madonna Adriana protested. “His Holiness will never allow it, not with the French army coming farther south every day—”
“This has nothing to do with Rodrigo.”
“Of course it does. You think he will allow you to take a sudden journey unattended and without permission?”
“Carmelina, will you be good enough to find Leonello for me?” Madonna Giulia’s eyes fell on me where I’d stooped to the floor to pick up the broken fragments of plate. “I know you can’t stand the sight of him, and frankly right now I can’t either, as nasty as he’s been to me lately, but I’ll want his protection on the journey. My usual guardsmen and grooms as well, of course; please tell the steward.”
“Yes, Madonna Giulia,” I said at once.
“You’re coming too. I don’t intend to stop at inns, so I’ll need someone to cook on the road. Bring that apprentice of yours if you need someone to help with the heavy work.”
“Giulia, please.” Madonna Adriana’s broad face had already begun to perspire in the steam still coming from the bath. “You really cannot—”
“—miss my own brother’s deathbed?” Giulia flared at her, standing straight and naked on the mosaic floor, wet hair uncoiling in clinging strings over her back. “No, I quite agree. Please give Lucrezia my love, and tell her why I did not have time to thank Lord Sforza for his hospitality.”
Madonna Giulia turned away, tugging her wet hair over one shoulder and beginning to weave it into a hasty plait as she called to the maid—“Just a riding dress and a few spares, Pia, nothing else!” But Madonna Adriana’s hand fastened on her arm. She spoke in a low voice, one I shouldn’t have heard, but I spent all my days tuning to the sotto voce mutters of my sulky scullions.
“Giulia, my dear, Rodrigo was very angry with you when you disobeyed him before, in the matter of Lucrezia’s marriage. You think he will be forgiving again, when he’s just gotten over his temper at your last disobedience? At least ask his permission first. Then you can go to your brother with a full papal guard.”
Giulia took a deep breath, and I wondered if the flush from her cheeks came entirely from the bath’s heat. “Carmelina,” she said quietly, and I found myself hurrying to her side. “Go find Leonello now, and the stewards. We will all leave in one hour.”
Giulia
I wasn’t a half second out of my saddle before Sandro grabbed me up tight, lifting me clear off the courtyard’s dusty stones. “Sorellina,” he whispered. “I didn’t think the Pope would allow you to make the journey, with the French—”
“The Pope does not own me.” I felt my eyes prick and buried my face in my big brother’s shoulder. “Angelo, is he—”
Sandro’s lean handsome face was drawn tight about the eyes. “The fever took him this morning.”
My heart squeezed. I’d half killed my poor gray mare on the ride to Lake Bolsena, I’d lashed at Carmelina and Leonello and the rest of my entourage whenever they proposed a stop for sleep or water or rest—and for what? My big brother was dead. I hadn’t seen him since my wedding; I’d hardly given him a thought except to feel irritated when he wrote asking me to wheedle money or favors out of my Pope—but now he was gone, gone for good, and I’d never have a chance to mend things between us.
“Shhh, don’t cry.” Sandro ran a thumb under my welling eyes. “You came, and that’s what matters.”
So strange to be home—so very strange. Back in the drafty octagonal castello of my childhood, worn and just a little crumbling about the edges, washed by the lake on three sides so the sound of lapping water reached the ear from every room. The chilly chamber I had shared with Gerolama as a girl was the same: a curtained bed where I had wrestled her for my fair share of the blankets and dreamed about who my future husband would be. The smell of the lake was the same, and the dusty streets where old women in black gossiped on their steps and children ran shouting and clacking sticks together, and mules trudged past with loads of fish still flopping their death throes. An old dress I found in my girlhood clothes chest was the same, last worn when I was a virgin girl who had never even heard the names of Orsino Orsini or Rodrigo Borgia.
So strange.
“How long should we make preparations to stay?” Leonello asked me.
I looked at him oddly. He was foreign to me, a piece of one life entirely out of place among another very different existence. He stuck out like a harlot in a church, or an obscenity in a prayer, or a French army in Rome. “I don’t know,” I said in a blank voice, and moved to join my family.
I had never been close to Angelo, not as I was with Sandro. My older brother had been almost a man grown when I was born, too busy and important to take notice of another sister who would only have to be dowered and married off. He’d never had time for me, not until I became the Pope’s mistress and thus a person to be asked for favors. I’d never quite forgiven him for that, and I hadn’t wanted to come back to Capodimonte to visit him. Time enough to forgive him later, I’d thought—only now there wasn’t.
He’d gotten fatter in the past two years; the folds of a premature double chin pressed stiff and waxy behind his collar as he lay on his bier surrounded by candles. His wife wept softly, clutching her two little girls. My sister, Gerolama, sat beside her, red-eyed and exhausted, and she rose to give me an unexpected hug instead of her usual scolding.
So strange.
I sat vigil beside my brother as Sandro and our other brother greeted the guests of Capodimonte who came to pay their respects. Familiar faces, faces I had known since childhood, so why did they look at me so avidly? “They’ve all heard of you, you know,” Gerolama said with a touch of her old asperity.
Heard of me—of course. I was little Giulia Farnese, who had left home to be married, as all girls did, but then became the Pope’s harlot. I was notorious. I’d been notorious for nearly two years, really, but I hadn’t been home in all that time to see my neighbors gossiping and whispering as they looked at me. The following day during the funeral procession, more people looked at me than at Angelo’s bier as it advanced slowly through the streets. I’d walked the Pope’s daughter to her wedding in the Vatican, but I didn’t walk behind my brother’s body with Sandro—that wasn’t how thi
ngs were done here. I waited in the church in a borrowed black dress that didn’t suit me, head decently covered, watching the priests and then the coffin and then my brothers trail past, and still people stared at me like I had two heads.
Sandro stood at my side during the requiem, splendid and remote in his scarlet regalia. Under cover of his red sleeve, his fingers twined with mine. “Cardinal Farnese,” I heard someone snigger during the Kyrie. “He’s a petticoat cardinal if I ever saw one—only got the red hat for being the Borgia brother-in-law!”
Sandro whipped round with a black glare. “Hold your filthy tongue!” he snapped, and the priest broke off mid-word, and there was a moment of frozen silence in which people stared at us. I looked at the floor, but Sandro just leveled another glare. “Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison . . .” the priest resumed, but not before I heard soft giggles behind us.
The rest of the requiem was just a fog. I heard none of it, just stared at the altar. The church itself was the same as it ever was: the cross-eyed Madonna before whom I’d wriggled in childhood agonies of boredom during Mass; the steps I’d skipped up weekly to make confession; the shrine before which a half-drunk lay friar had tried to grope me when I was twelve. The churchyard was the same, the dry summer grass seeded with tiny yellow flowers. At Angelo’s grave site, I stooped to pluck one of those flowers and stood twirling it between my fingers, watching dry-eyed as his coffin was lowered into the earth. His wife sobbed beside me—had she loved him so much? I’d had no idea. How strange, to have a husband you loved, who maybe even loved you in return.
“Whore,” someone whispered in the crowd behind me.
“Will you go back to Rome?” Sandro asked me the day after we put our brother into the ground. He’d found me up on the tallest of the turrets, looking out over the rippling blue expanse of lake. I’d spent so many hours up here with my battered crownless straw hat, sunning my hair. I couldn’t afford expensive saffron and cinnabar rinses back then. Sandro leaned an elbow on the stone parapet, looking down at me.
“I should go back to Rome.” I’d already had a letter from Madonna Adriana, warning that Rodrigo was furious with me. Not that I’d flown to my brother’s deathbed, but that I’d done so without permission and without considering the dangers of the advancing French army. I hadn’t really given the French a thought. When you get news of a deathbed in the family, even the deathbed of a brother you’ve been on rather cold terms with, you go. Rodrigo wouldn’t have given a thought to the French either, if he had gotten news that one of his precious children was deathly ill—yet he was angry with me for doing exactly the same thing! I ask you. “I don’t want to go back to Rome just yet,” I said.
“Good.” Sandro ruffled my hair. “I hate seeing you hop just because that mitered old goat bleats.”
I gave my brother a look. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t call the Holy Father names behind his back.”
“I certainly can’t say them to his face. I find I can’t dislike him enough for that. But”—and a hint of relish entered Sandro’s voice—“I quite enjoy the thought of our Holy Father fuming away like a spurned schoolboy as you skip off for a holiday.”
“A family funeral? Hardly a holiday, Sandro!”
“—like Menelaus fuming as Helen skips off to Troy with Paris—”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Sandro had been so drawn and sad since my arrival, and I was glad to see a little of his old sparkle returning. He wasn’t meant for sadness.
“So you’ll be staying awhile?” Sandro pressed. “I thought I’d stay myself; shirk my duties in Rome for a bit. Everyone thinks I’m a prancing clown as a cardinal anyway; might as well live up to the reputation.”
“You are a prancing clown,” I told my brother. “You’re the worst cardinal in Christendom.”
“I follow my Holy Father’s example in all things,” Sandro said piously. “Down to the fine palazzo and the bastard babies. You know Silvia’s pregnant? My very first bastard; such a milestone!”
“Oh, Sandro.”
“She craves oysters all the time,” he said airily. “Did you crave oysters? They’re very expensive. Maybe she just says she craves them, because she knows I’ll buy her anything in this state. She wants a boy—she’s already planning I’ll be Pope someday; then she’ll be La Bella of Rome and our son will marry a Spanish princess or a Neapolitan duchess just like the Borgia sons. I haven’t the heart to tell her that your pet goat is more likely to be elected Pope than me.”
“What you should tell her is that it’s not all jewels and glamour being La Bella.” I had found spittle on my hem after Angelo’s funeral; men had leered at me while their wives dragged at their elbows to pull them away; and several friends I’d giggled with in childhood—girls I’d whispered and dreamed with, bouncing on the way to confession as we planned the dresses we would someday have and the handsome husbands we would marry—had looked right through me when I greeted them. In Rome I was a harlot, but I was at least an important one, someone of whom favors were begged and influence courted. Here in dusty little Capodimonte a straying wife was just a whore, no matter how powerful the man with whom she strayed. No wonder none of my now-respectably-married friends wanted to know me anymore.
“Dio,” Leonello said dryly after a fortnight’s stay. “I thought Pesaro was dull and backward. Now it seems a metropolis of enlightenment and culture.” The servants all seemed to think my bodyguard was the Devil himself, from the way they forked their fingers in the sign of the evil eye every time he strode past. He didn’t help matters by crossing his eyes at them and hissing like a serpent in response. My sister thought Leonello a freakish little man and far too rude, but Sandro liked him. They played primiera in the evenings, or they did before Sandro’s duties as cardinal finally recalled him to Rome, and usually Leonello won.
I had letters. From Lucrezia, complaining that her father was blaming her for not keeping me in Pesaro, and really why did she deserve to be dragged into this? From Madonna Adriana, saying the usual, or so I assumed—I tore her letters up unread. From Orsino—he was hunting; he was wel; was I wel; and since I was so close by, would I consider visitting him in Basanelo before he had to leave with his troops to march against the Frenche? And of course, I had letters from my Pope.
“Not such a good letter as the last one, Madonna Giulia?” Carmelina asked me, bringing a plate of damson-stuffed focaccia roses to the rooftop where I sat looking out over the lake again and bouncing Laura in my lap, because I didn’t feel like reading Rodrigo’s furious scrawl.
“Not so good, no,” I answered. “It’s always a bad sign in his letters when he starts cursing in Spanish, Italian, and Latin.”
Carmelina eyed me curiously. A month ago I’d have been frantic at the thought that Rodrigo was angry with me—I had been frantic. Now I couldn’t seem to care. I tossed the letter aside, holding Laura up so she could see the blue glitter of the lake below. “That’s Lake Bolsena, Lauretta mia, isn’t it beautiful? I’ll take you swimming in it tomorrow—”
“How long will we be staying, Madonna Giulia?” Carmelina asked me, and I heard the real question. Madonna Giulia, why are we staying? In Pesaro, Leonello had asked me a question about my Pope. Why do you fight to keep him? I hadn’t known how to answer that, but here I’d had time to think the matter through. “You know something, Carmelina?” I mused. “All my life, I’ve been trained to please. Please my mother; please the priests; please my husband.” Only that hadn’t worked out, so I’d set myself to pleasing Rodrigo Borgia instead. It had never even occurred to me to stop trying, when his eye began to wander. And where had all that eager-to-please anxiety gotten me? Holding my breath, worrying that I might anger him if I dared to side with his daughter or go to my own brother’s funeral!
“I’m tired of trying to please everyone else,” I announced. “I’m going to please myself for once, and I don’t care if I anger His Holiness or my mother-in-law. I want some time to myself, time to play with Laura, and sit in the sun, an
d think and sleep and eat. So I’ll take another plate of those focaccia things, Carmelina, and we’re going to stay in Capodimonte until I feel like leaving.”
She grinned at me. “As you please, Madonna Giulia.”
A month—six weeks. Carmelina invaded the kitchens like a French army, and the food improved markedly. Pantisilea was so busy bed-hopping through the local farmers, she was looking quite hollow-eyed. Gerolama and her husband went back to Florence. “Not that Florence is a pleasant place these days,” she sniffed. “That mad monk Savonarola has everyone stirred up! Not that he isn’t right about most things, there’s no doubting the world is a wicked greedy place, but now he wants us all to burn our good furniture and our nice clothes and live like mendicants!”
“Absurd,” I agreed. But mad Dominican monks seemed as remote as anything else. I couldn’t even get interested in the advancing French, though I’d heard dark whispers at Mass that they’d raped and murdered their way as far south as Parma, or maybe it was Bologna. Nothing would change Capodimonte, not even the French. Nothing ever changed here. Once I had found that maddening, but now I was not so sure.
I had another letter from my husband. I had another letter from my Pope, who must have heard about Orsino’s letters, because Rodrigo went from irritated to enraged in one short page. He began Thankless, treacherous Giulia! and went swiftly downhill from there.
You’ll lose him, warned the part of me that still worried about placating him. You’ll lose him, and then where will you be?
Here, I thought. Because if Rodrigo tired of me, this life could be mine again, or one very much like it, with my husband in Carbognano or Bassanello. And even though I’d dreamed as a girl of a life of luxury in the Holy City, now I found I had been missing this old life. I liked eating quiet meals with my family rather than a palazzo full of ambitious courtiers and slippery ambassadors and scheming cardinals. I liked passing my visiting hours not with petitioners angling for favors, but with Angelo’s widow, whom I was trying to dissuade from her notion of retiring to a nunnery; with Sandro and his pert little mistress Silvia, whom he had begun bringing with him on his visits from Rome whenever he felt like shirking his ecclesiastical duties. And more than anything, I liked spending my days with Laura. All day, every day; combing her hair and taking her swimming and teaching her her first prayers now that she was old enough to speak proper words. Mothering her myself, instead of passing her off to her nurse for hours because I was required for yet another banquet at the Vatican.